It wasn't:
Prepared a sinister mate
For her—so gaily great— A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
For if you give four stars to that line, how are you to rank "A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate"? Or, for that matter, "a sinister mate"? As conjunctions go, it is so far ahead of 1912! It's straight out of Auden. Lines like that are invasions of the future into the present, they are whiffs of the Immanent Will themselves. The choice of "mate" is absolutely marvelous, since apart from alluding to "shipmate," it again underscores the ship's femininity, sharpened even further by the next trimeter: "For her—so gaily great—"
What we are getting here, with increasing clarity, is not so much collision as a metaphor for romantic union as the other way around: the union as a metaphor for the collision. The femininity of the ship and the masculinity of the iceberg are clearly established. Except that it is not exactly the iceberg. The real mark of our poet's genius is in his offering a circumlocution: "A Shape of Ice." Its menacing power is directly proportionate to the reader's ability to fashion that shape according to his own imagination's negative potential. In other words, this circumlocution—actually, its letter a alone—insinuates the reader into the poem as an active participant.
Practically the same job is performed by "for the time far and dissociate." Now, "far" as an epithet attached to time is commonplace; any poet could do it. But it takes Hardy to use in verse the utterly unpoetic "dissociate." This is the benefit of the general stylistic nonchalance of his we commented on earlier. There are no good, bad, or neutral words for this poet: they are either functional or not. This could be put down, of course, to his experience with prose, were it not for his frequently stated abhorrence of the smooth, "jewelled line."
And "dissociate" is about as unglittering as it is functional. It bespeaks not only the Immanent Will's farsightedness but time's own disjointed nature: not in the Shakespearean but in the purely metaphysical—which is to say, highly perceptible, tactile, mundane—sense. The latter is what makes any member of the audience identify with the disaster's participants, placing him or her within time's atomizing domain. What ultimately saves "dissociate," of course, is its being rhymed, with the attendant aspect of resolution moreover, in the third, hexametric line.
Actually, in the last two stanzas, the rhymes get better and better: engaging and unpredictable. To appreciate "dissociate" fully, perhaps, one should try reading the stanza's rhymes vertically, column-wise. One would end up with "mate—great—dissociate." This is enough to give one a shudder, and this is far from being gratuitous, since the succession clearly emerged in the poet's mind before the stanza was finished. In fact, this succession was precisely what allowed him to finish the stanza, and to do it the way he did.
And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue In shado\v' silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
And so it emerges that we are dealing with the betrothed. With the feminine smart ship engaged early on to a Shape of Ice. A construction to nature. Almost a brunette to a blonde. Something was growing in Plymouth docks toward that which was growing "In shadowy silent distance" somewhere in the North Atlantic. The hushed, conspiratorial "shadowy silent distance" underscores the secretive, intimate character of this information, and the stresses falling almost mechanically on each word in this stanza sort of echo time's measured pace—the pace of this maid's and her mate's advancement toward one another. For it is that pace that makes the encounter inevitable, not the pair's individual features.
What also makes their approach inexorable is the excess of rhyme in this stanza. "Grew" creeps into the third line, making this triplet contain four rhymes. That could be regarded, of course, as a cheap effect, were it not for the rhyme's sound. "Grew—hue—too" has, as a euphonic referent, the word "you," and the second "grew" triggers the reader's realization of his/her involvement in the story, and not as its addressee only.
Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history . . .
In the euphonic context of the last four stanzas, "Alien" comes as an exclamation, its wide-open vowels being like the last cry of the doomed before submitting to the unavoidable. It's like "not guilty" on the scaffold, or "I don't love him" before the altar: pale face turned to the public. And the altar it is, for "welding" as well as "history" in the third line sound like homonyms for "wedding" and "destiny." So "No mortal eye could see" is not so much the poet's bragging about being privy to the workings of causality as the voice of a Father Lorenzo.
Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event . . .
Again, no poet in his right mind, unless his is Gerard Manley Hopkins's, would stud a line with stresses in such a hammering manner. And not even Hopkins would dare to use in verse "anon" like this. Is this our old friend Mr. Hardy's abhorrence of the smooth line, reaching here a degree of perversity? Or a further attempt to obscure, with this Middle English equivalent of"at once," a "mortal eye" 's ability to see what he, the poet, sees? An elongation of the perspective? Going for those coincident paths of origin? His only concession to the standard view of the disaster? Or just a heightening of the pitch, the way "august" does, in view of the poem's finale, to pave the way for the Immanent Will's saying its piece:
Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
"Everything" that the Immanent Will "stirs and urges" presumably includes time. Hence the Immanent Will's new billing: "Spinner of the Years." This is a bit too personified for the abstract notion's abstract good, but we may put this down to the ecclesiastical architect's inertia in Hardy. He--comes uncomfortably close here to equating the meaningless with the malevolent, whereas Schopenhauer pushes precisely the blind mechanistic—which is to say, nonhuman—nature of that Will, whose presence is recognized by all forms of existence, both animate and inanimate, through stress, conflict, tension, and, as in the case at hand, through disaster.
This, in the final analysis, is what lies behind his poetry's quite ubiquitous predilection for the dramatic anecdote. The nonhumanity of the ultimate truth about the phenomenal world fires up his imagination the way female beauty does many a Lothario's. A biological determinist, on the one hand, he eagerly, as it were, embraces Schopenhauer's notion not only because it amounts in his mind to the source of completely unpredictable and otherwise unaccountable occurrences (unifying thus the "far and dissociate") but also, one suspects, to account for his own "indifference."
You could bill him as a rational irrationalist, of course, but that would be a mistake, since the concept of Immanent Will is not irrational. No, quite the contrary. It is highly uncomfortable, not to say menacing, perhaps; but that is a different matter altogether. Discomfort shouldn't be equated with irrationality any more than rationality with comfort. Still, this is the wrong place for nit-picking. One thing is clear: the Immanent Will for our poet has the status of Supreme Entity, bordering on that ofPrime Mover. Fittingly, then, it speaks in monosyllables; fittingly, also, it says, "Now."
The most fitting word in this last stanza, however, is, of course, "consummation," since the collision occurred at night. With "consummation" we have the marital union trope seen, as it were, to the end. "Jars," with its allusion to broken earthenware, is more this trope's residue than its enhancement. It is a stunning verb here, making the two hemispheres, which the "maiden" voyage of the Titanic was supposed to connect, into two clashing convex receptacles. It looks as if it was precisely the notion of "maiden" that struck the chord of our poet's "lyre" first.